Novelists are frequently asked “How much of what you write comes from your own life?” Penelope Lively has a bit of fun with that question in her story collection, Making It Up. The starting point for each of the stories in this collection is a pivotal moment from the author’s own life, but each time she applies a plausible “what if instead” and produces a story that is not autobiographical at all. The stories are good ones on their own, but, bracketed with Lively’s comments, they offer, in addition, a fascinating look at the authorial process. Her approach to writing grew out of a youthful habit of making up stories for comfort and respite from an isolated and often boring childhood.
Illinois mystery writer Michael Allen Dymmoch offers a different perspective. She thinks artists in general, and writers, in particular, are scavengers: “All of us take our materials where we can.” An early writing teacher encouraged her to eavesdrop and Dymmoch took this advice to heart. She’s worked as a professional driver, including a stint with the Chicago Transit Authority, and is also a photographer. In other words, she lurks, looking and listening.
Dymmoch is the author of a successful mystery series featuring the unlikely crime-fighting partnership of a gay psychiatrist and a straight Chicago police officer, as well as several stand-alone thrillers. Her stories are well-crafted and her characters confront complex and unusual situations. She has ideas for at least seven more books in the series and “sequels” for several of her other novels.
Sounds wildly imaginative to me, but she calls herself a scavenger: “Some of my best lines are borrowed (Okay stolen—I’m never giving them back). Some of my best settings are places I came across in transit or discovered when I was looking for somewhere else. Many of my favorite characters are riffs on real people I’ve seen or clashed with. “Dymmoch’s life as an author came about accidentally, thanks to the suggestion of a friend and a couple of library books.
Michael A. Black, another Chicago area writer, has been a police officer for the past 30 years. Most of his 11 novels are police procedurals and naturally draw heavily from his personal experience in the field. He says his characters are “composites” of real people and his goal is to “get it right” – something that many crime writers and almost all crime TV shows don’t. He hopes to present “a cop’s view” which, according to Black, comes from a life lived on two tracks. The one track we’re all on: jobs, relationships, health, money, the usual routine. The other track is unique to police work: the unpredictable but inevitable moments of intense personal confrontation and possible violence and tragedy.
Black’s novels have a hard-boiled edge and an insider’s authenticity. He’s unflinching in his depiction of the intersection of politics and law enforcement and brutal in his descriptions of cops gone to seed, waiting out their pension requirements. And he does get it right: that unnerving jolt from everyday preoccupation to life-threatening encounter, from bad coffee and break-room triviality to officers down all over the scene at a stake-out gone wrong, when the two tracks of a cop’s life intersect.
Michael Black considers law enforcement to be his calling but he’s been writing all his life. He has a bachelor’s degree in English and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Fiction Writing. Besides his novels, he has written 40 articles on various topics and 30 short stories.
In the midst of working on this article, I helped a library patron print off a copy of his novel. He was not my first; writing novels in libraries is nothing new. Ray Bradbury famously wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a rental typewriter in the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library and science fiction writer Timothy Zahn began his career on the second floor of my very own library in the late 1970s. He reportedly enjoyed naming his aliens after members of his local church.
No, it’s nothing new. These people are everywhere and they’re always looking for new material. They may be making it up or they may be watching you. Maybe it’s your eyebrows or your jaw line that they want. Or maybe it’s your soul. Beware.
(Photograph from Abulic Monkey, Creative Commons, Flickr.com)
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